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Thunderbolt on Windows Performance with Asus, Intel and Promise

Intel’s Light Peak technology eventually matured into what now is known in the market as Thunderbolt, which debuted initially as an Apple I/O exclusive last year. As we mentioned in our IDF coverage a few years ago, Light Peak was being developed by Intel in collaboration with Apple. So it wasn’t a huge surprise that Apple got an early exclusivity agreement, but there were actually a number of other partners on board as well, including Aja, Apogee, Avid, Blackmagic, LaCie, Promise and Western Digital.

Thunderbolt has been available on some Apple systems for over a year now and it’s been met with mostly positive results. There are also a handful of Thunderbolt compatible devices already on the market thanks to Apple’s head-start, from the likes of Promise, Lacie, WD and others.

On the Windows front, however, Thunderbolt is still in its infancy and there are still a few bugs to work out of systems and solutions.

To test Thunderbolt under Windows, we got our hands on a couple of high-end motherboards that have the technology built-in, Intel’s DZ77RE-75K and the Asus P8Z77-V Premium, along with a Thunderbolt-enabled Direct Attached Storage RAID system from Promise.

The numbers speak for themselves. Glorious bandwidth; there is no substitute…